Editor's Note

The Charge

"I just don't know anymore. There was good, and there was evil. Now,
they're blending, mixing together. I can't tell where one ends and the other
begins. I'm not sure what the difference is anymore."—Jack
Marshak

Opening Statement

As most everyone knows by now, Friday the 13th: The Series had nothing
to do with Jason Voorhees, Camp Crystal Lake, or anything else from the Friday the 13th movies.
Instead, this show is about antiques that have been cursed by the devil. If you
think that sounds ridiculous, you're right. It is ridiculous, but in a
wonderfully entertaining way.

This season is the one when regular character Ryan left the show, to be
replaced by newcomer Johnny. It's also the season that the gore and dark themes
finally got to be too much for censors, leading to the greatest of all TV
evils—cancellation.

Facts of the Case

Scary old Uncle Lewis once sold a bunch of cursed antiques from his store,
Curious Goods. Lewis is long gone now, and the task of finding and recovering
all the evil objects falls to his niece Micki (Robey, The Money Pit), his nephew Ryan (John D.
Le May, The Couch Trip), their occultist friend Jack Marshak (Chris
Wiggins, Franklin's Magic Christmas) and streetwise tough guy Johnny
(Steven Monarque, Sixteen Candles).

This episode list is safely locked away inside the vault:

• "The Prophecies" Parts One and TwoEvil
antique: Lucifer's bible (an ancient book)What it does:
Fulfills six prophecies that will allow Satan himself to walk the Earth in
physical form The two-hour season premiere has the characters traveling to
a small village in France, where they confront a devil worshipper with
supernatural powers, murderous nuns, a building full of violent mental patients,
and more. All the while, signs point to doom in Ryan's future.

• "Demon Hunter"Evil antique: A daggerWhat it does: Allows the owner to summon and control a demon The
bulk of this episode is spent with a family of paramilitary/mercenary types
(backdoor pilot, maybe?) hunting and tracking a demon that looks like some kind
of caveman. Back at the store, Micki and Jack explore a huge, mysterious chamber
found hidden under the building.

• "Crippled Inside"Evil antique: A wicker
wheelchairWhat it does: The more people die, the healthier the
chair's owner gets Written by Brian Helgeland (Mystic River)! With Micki and Jack out
of town, Johnny has his first solo adventure. His morals are put to the test
when he learns a teen girl is using the chair to enact revenge against the boys
who hurt her, and that she might walk again once she's killed them all.

• "Stick it in Your Ear"Evil antique: A
hearing aidWhat it does: Gives its wearer the power to read
minds Normally on this show, the antique owner has to kill someone in
order to get the antique to work its magic. In this case, though, the owner, a
mentalist with a cheesy nightclub act, is so bombarded with others' thoughts
that he has to kill in order to turn it off.

• "Bad Penny"Evil antique: A coinWhat it does: Brings people back from the dead This one's a direct
sequel to the second season episode "Heads You Live, Tails You Die."
Instead of megalomaniacal cultists, though, this time the coin ends up with
Johnny, who's tempted to use it to bring his father back to life.

• "Hate on Your Dial"Evil antique: A car
radioWhat it does: Time travel! This infamously
controversial episode has our heroes tracking down an imbecilic racist car
mechanic who's using the radio to drive his car back to 1954 and finish a
Klan-related hate crime his father started.

• "Night Prey"Evil antique: A crossWhat it does: Kills vampires, but only if it's used to kill an innocent
human first Do two wrongs make a right? That's the question Jack struggles
with as he, Micki, and Johnny face an obsessive vampire hunter who's killing
people in exchange for slaying those pesky bloodsuckers.

• "Femme Fatale"Evil antique: A film
printWhat it does: Brings a fictional movie character to life, by
having it temporarily switch places with someone watching An aging
filmmaker with a dying wife is our killer this week, in this homage to classic
film noir. Naturally, Micki becomes his latest target, and ends up trapped in an
alternate world with fedora-wearing cops and tough-talking gangsters.

• "Mightier Than the Sword"Evil antique:
A penWhat it does: It works like a syringe by injecting victims
with its ink, and this allows its owner to control their actions with his
writing Another one written by Brian Helgeland! The pen is owned by a
famous true crime writer, who's turning ordinary people into serial killers just
for the sake of his bestsellers. When Micki gets too close, she ends up as the
murderous star of his next book.

• "Year of the Monkey"Evil antique: Three
small monkey statues, in the see/hear/speak no evil posesWhat it
does: Enhances the senses of its owners Guest starring Tia Carrere (True Lies)! To get a cursed tea set back from a
martial arts master, Micki, Jack, and Johnny must first collect the three monkey
statues. In Japan, a dying millionaire is using the three monkey statues to test
the loyalty of his three children. I bet you never would have guessed that this
show would do its own twisted version of Kurosawa's Ran.

• "Epitaph for a Lonely Soul"Evil
antique: An embalmer's aspiratorWhat it does: Brings people
back from the dead, kind of like that coin How's this for creepy—a
mortician brings a beautiful woman back to life in the hopes of making her his
bride. They even "get it on" while she's in a half-dead, half-alive
state. The Curious Goods gang helps her husband track down what's happened to
her.

• "Midnight Riders"Evil antique: Check it
out—this is the only episode of the series that doesn't have an evil
antique A bunch of undead motorcyclists are tearing through the
countryside, wreaking havoc. The ghost of Jack's father is running around, as
well. It turns out that not every supernatural occurrence has to do with Uncle
Lewis's store.

• "Repetition"Evil antique: A child's
necklaceWhat it does: Holds a killer's victim's soul inside it Written by Jennifer Lynch (Boxing
Helena)! What happens to the little girl at the start of this episode is
another one of this show's famous "Holy crap, I can't believe they aired
that" moments. So a successful newspaper columnist is being haunted by a
spirit inside the necklace, and must kill to set it free.

• "The Long Road Home"Evil antique: An
amulet with the yin-yang symbolWhat it does: Allows the owner's
soul to inhabit the body of anyone he kills This one starts off right in
the middle of the action, with the killer right in the middle of duking it out
with Johnny and Micki. The body-swapping antics continue after our heroes are
confronted by two psychotic brothers during a huge storm.

• "My Wife as a Dog"Evil antique: A dog
leashWhat it does: Turns people into animals If I hadn't
seen this episode, I never would have believed someone actually put this premise
on screen—a guy uses the leash to combine his wife and his dog into a
single creature, one he believes will be "perfectly loyal." Meanwhile,
the fire marshal is threatening to close Curious Goods, which could mean
emptying out the vault.

• "Spirit of Television"Evil antique: A
1950s televisionWhat it does: Summons vengeful spirits A
fraudulent psychic is using the TV set during séances to wow customers.
These customers later die due to exploding televisions. When the psychic kills
one of Micki's favorite singers, she and the others investigate.

• "Jack-in-the-Box"Evil antique: A
jack-in-the-boxWhat it does: Summons the dead, again Time
for another "little kids in peril" episode that this show does so
well. A little girl is able to spend time with her dead father, but daddy's time
comes with a grisly price.

• "Tree of Life"Evil antique: A small
Celtic idolWhat it does: Supplies druid magic A new age-y
fertility clinic has an unnaturally high success rate. When Johnny suspects it
might be up to no good, he looks into it. The mystery involves baby-swapping,
druid blood rituals, and trees that eat people.

• "The Charnel Pit"Evil antique: A
paintingWhat it does: Time travel, again! The series ends
with Micki going back to the year 1790, where she becomes a prisoner of the
Marquis de Sade, who is depicted here as a torture-happy serial-killing madman.
Trapped in his dungeon, so far from home, is there any hope left inside Micki,
or will she give herself over to the darkness, forever?

The Evidence

After two seasons of gore, murder, terror, and darkness, the creators of
Friday the 13th: The Series went for broke, pushing the envelope as far
as they could. It must have been a cursed Curious Goods envelope, because it
pushed back. Allegedly, the show wasn't cancelled because of ratings or budgets,
but because of censors freaking out over some of the gruesomeness seen early on
in this third season. I have no evidence of this outside of Internet rumors, but
after revisiting this series on disc, I can see how that argument could be
made.

The two-hour season premiere borrows heavily from the likes of The Exorcist, The Omen, and those other "satanic
thrillers" of the 1970s. There's a lot of talk about the devil, possession,
faith, prayer, martyrdom, and so on. It's a lot of serious business, especially
considering this show once did an episode about people shrunk down and trapped
inside a snow globe. There have been episodes about sinister devil worshippers
before, but this season opener takes us a lot farther into the world of God
versus Satan than the series has ever gone. It's not the perfect—I can't
believe no one noticed the villain walking around in public in his black
robes—but it is more intense and less "fun horror" than this
show usually provides. Add to this the fact that it's Ryan's last episode, and
the episode gets even darker. There are various hints throughout that Ryan is
doomed. Then, when the devil takes a personal interest in Ryan, the episode gets
even darker. Ryan's final exit from the series is strange, to say the least, but
no stranger than anything else on this strange show.

This Satan-tastic episode doesn't change the show that radically, though.
It's still Friday the 13: The Series, and that means it's cheesier than
the hike up Cheese Mountain during Cheesetoberfest in the mythical nation of
Cheesetopia. Here's another season full of crazed killers, zombified corpses,
brutal stabbings, gooey slime, windows spontaneously flying open during
thunderstorms, and all the rest of the trappings that the fans enjoy. Most of
these episodes follow the show's usual formula, in which someone uses an
antique's power for personal gain, often in exchange for killing. What's fun,
then, is when other episodes mess with that formula. This happens when some Predator rip-off characters take
center stage in "Demon Hunter," and when there's no antique at all in
"Midnight Riders."

The writers really put Micki through the cursed wringer in this season. In
"Bad Penny," she not only has to deal with losing Ryan, but she's also
confronted with the traumatizing memories of what happened to her the last time
she encountered the evil coin. Robey makes with the dramatics big time, crying
and freaking out all over the place, especially when confronting the coin's new
owner. At other times, Micki is too often placed in "damsel in
distress" mode, as she's the one captured and/or terrorized by the villain
of the week. In some of these cases, though, it's nice to see her use her wits
to get herself out of trouble. Chris Wiggins continues to bring his excellent
professionalism to the brainy role of Jack. It's hard to imagine him as any
other character.

As the newcomer to the Curious Goods store and its world, Johnny is more
than just Ryan version 2.0. By this point, Micki and Jack have the whole
"searching for evil antiques" thing down to a science. Johnny,
however, hasn't gone through everything they've gone through, so this frees him
up to question how they do things, and some of the decisions they make. Johnny
often argues in favor of using one of the antiques to get out of a jam, in the
hopes they can be used for good, and that he can fight the temptation to turn it
around and use them for evil. This doesn't go as planned, obviously. Johnny also
has his first solo attempt at getting one of the antiques away from its owner,
and this too does not go as smoothly as he hoped. Having a character go through
the ropes for the first time makes the show still feel new and exciting.

This season's top five best gross-outs:

5: That one lady's fingernails falling off4: The
wrinkly old man with no upper teeth and all-white eyeballs shouting
"Lucifer is coming!"3: An up-close and very slimy look
at how bodies are embalmed2: A guy reaches into his own ear and
pulls out what I'm assuming is the eardrum, represented by a long, slimy
worm-looking thing1: The racism

Going back to those Internet rumors, the "Hate on Your Dial"
episode is allegedly what got the show cancelled, thanks to horrific images of
Klansmen doing awful things to African Americans. The episode has a lot of
offensive language, which is intentional to reflect the villains' evil, but I
have to wonder if some is not, and merely pushing 1980s' boundaries, not 1950s'
boundaries. It's possible, of course, that I'm taking the episode far too
seriously, and that the show's creators needed a monster of the week, and
decided on "racists." It's more strange than it is uncomfortable.
There's a lot of strangeness this season, such as the guy turning his dog into
his wife, the out-of-nowhere Kurosawa homage, the other guys with their dead
stuffed parents, and more. There are a lot fewer traditional "horror
movie" moments, and a lot more moments that are just plain weird. Whether
that's a good or bad thing depends on your own sensibilities.

The picture and audio on this five-disc set is hit or miss. The visuals are
soft throughout, but there are times when they look far too rough than they
should be, and are hard on the eyes. The audio suffers as well, as many times I
strained to hear what the actors were saying. There aren't a ton of extras, but
most of the episodes come with their original "next week on" promo,
which is a nice little treat for fans.

The Rebuttal Witnesses

No Uncle Lewis this season? He's the big bad. I missed him this time
around.

Closing Statement

During this season, the minds behind Friday the 13th: The Series
experimented with new types of stories and took risks too see how much they
could get away with on TV. These choices got their show cancelled, but it also
made for some crazy watching. It's cheesy and laughable, but it's also
unpredictable and over-the-top. The "fun" quality of the series
outweighs the cheese.

The Verdict

Not guilty. Cheesy, yes, but not guilty.

Give us your feedback!

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